We turned the clocks ahead one hour on Sunday and yet as I was driving to the gym the other night, the sun just beginning to wind down a conversation about spring fashions with the Monet blue sky at 7:30 p.m., I turned the clocks way back. I was not 31, a mother of two and a full-time wearer of sensible teacher lady shoes driving to go use the eliptical machine for my allotted 30 minutes. I was 17, a girlfriend of no one but the freedoms and limitations and rippling confusions of adolescence, driving to play practice where I would flirt with boys and forget lines. The perfectly aligned row of flowering dogwood trees watched as I transformed into my 17 year-old counterpart, driving my mother's white mini-van, blaring the radio with the moxie and self-centeredness of a girl who only had a few months left of being a full-time denizen of a home with a kitchen and a yard and a comfortable couch. At 17, I had a superhero power of flicking on different personalities that convenienced different circumstances and companies of people. Flick on, flick off. I liberally changed like I pressed buttons on the tracks of a CD, the Lisa Loeb "Tails" CD that I played on repeat, abusing the rewind button to play "Sandalwood" one more time. Sometimes I get surges of teenagedom and I can only handle a small helping of the hormone and hyperactivity that once wreaked havoc on my little world. I crested the mountains and sunk into the deep deep valleys more in the course of a day than is healthy for anyone who is not 17 with a newly-minted license to drive and an extra hour of sunlight in the evening.
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